Reversible Errors

  It had started with a guy. Isn’t that how it always starts? Toby Elias was a gallant, handsome, twisted creature, an assistant in the Attorney General’s Office, whom Gillian had some thought of marrying. One night he’d returned home with a hit of heroin lifted from a case he tried. It was ‘the taste’ one doper had offered another as the prelude to a sale, introduced in evidence, and never returned after the verdict. ‘Why not?’ he asked. Toby always managed to make perversity stylish. His ironic unwillingness to follow the rules meant for everyone else had beguiled her. They chipped—snorted—the first night, and reduced the quantity each night thereafter. It was an unearthly peace, but nothing that required repetition.

  A month later, Toby stepped in front of an 18-wheeler. She never knew if it was an accident. He was not killed. He was a body in a bed for months, and then a dripping wreck in a wheelchair. And she had deserted him. She wasn’t married to the man. She couldn’t give him her life when he hadn’t promised his.

  Yet it was a sad turning point, she knew that now. Toby had never recovered and neither had she. Three or four months after that, she’d pinched a taste on her own for the first time. During a trial in front of her, she allowed the defense chemist to open the sealed evidence bag to weigh how much heroin had been seized. The rush seemed more delicious now. She forged opportunities, ordered tests performed when none had been requested, encouraged the prosecutors to lock their exhibits in her chambers overnight rather than tote them back to the P.A.’s Office. Eventually, the tampering was discovered, but a courtroom deputy was suspected and banished to an outlying precinct. After that, she had to score on the street. And she needed money.

  By then she was taken for a drunk. As a warning, she’d been transferred from the Felony Trial Division to Common Pleas, tort court, where she heard personal-injury cases. There somebody knew. One of those dopers she’d sentenced had recognized her, a pretty white lady lurking in the bombed-looking blocks less than a mile from the courthouse. He’d told the cop he snitched to. From there, word traveled to the Presiding Judge in Common Pleas, a villain named Brendan Tuohey, and his henchman, Rollo Kosic. Kosic visited her with the news, but offered no corrective. Just money. Take his advice from time to time about the outcome in a case. There would be money.

  And she complied, always with regrets, but life by now was the misery between hits. One night there was a knock, a scene out of 1984 or Darkness at Noon. The U.S. Attorney and FBI agents were on her doorstep. She’d been nailed, for bribery, not narcotics. She cried and blabbed and tooted as soon as they were gone.

  After that night, she’d turned to Duffy, her current landlord, a recovering alcoholic with long experience as a counselor from his days as a priest. She was sober when she was sentenced, her habit the only secret that survived a period in which she otherwise felt she’d been stripped naked and marched in chains down Marshall Avenue. She was not about to revive all of that now, surely not for Arthur Raven or for a murderer who had been beast enough to rape the dead.

  Yet the sudden viciousness that had escaped her with Arthur had shaken her, like finding a fissure in the ground under your feet. Seeking to spare herself further shame, she had, instead, compounded it. For hours, she would be dwelling on Raven and the way his mouth had softened to an incredulous little ‘o’ in the wake of her remark. She would need Duffy tonight, his quiet counsel, to keep her from drowning.

  With that much clear, she stood from the small table and caught sight again of herself. To the eye, there was a lean, elegant woman, appointed with care. But within was her truest enemy, a demon self, who, even after imprisonment and disgrace, remained unsatisfied and uncurbed, and, except for its will to see her suffer, unknown.

  4

  JULY 5, 1991

  The Prosecutor

  A WAIL, sudden enough to stop Muriel’s heart, broke out from the booth across from her as she sat at the soda-fountain counter. A black man in a full-length apron, probably the cook, had slid to his feet and the prospect of his departure seemed to have freshened the anguish of the woman there. Dark and thin, she was melted against him. The younger man, with a glimmering stud in his ear, lingered behind the two haplessly.

  “The widow,” whispered one of the techs, dusting the front case under the register. “She won’t go home.”

  The cook eased her over to the young fellow, who reluctantly raised an arm to her shoulder, while Mrs. Leonidis carried on fiercely. In one of those moments of cold-blooded clarity for which Muriel was already noted in the P.A.’s Office, she suddenly recognized that Gus’s widow was going through the standard gestures of grief as she understood them. The crying, the shrieking was her duty. A more genuine reaction to her husband’s death, true mourning, or even relief, would come long from now in private.

  Since the day she’d started as a prosecutor, Muriel had had an instinct for the survivors of violence. She was not sure how connected she’d been to her parents, or whether any man, including her dead husband, had ever mattered to the quick. But she cared for these victims with the radiant nuclear fury of the sun. It had not taken her long to see that their suffering arose not merely from their loss but also from its imponderable nature. Their pain was not due to some fateful calamity like a typhoon, or an enemy as fickle and unreasoning as disease, but to a human failure, to the demented will of an assailant and the failure of the regime of reason and rules to contain him. The victims were especially entitled to think this should never have happened —because, according to the law, it shouldn’t have.

  When Mrs. Leonidis was again under some control, she marched past Muriel to the Ladies’. The young man, who had escorted her halfway, cast Muriel a sheepish look as the rest-room door closed.

  “I can’t talk to her,” he explained. “My sisters are on the way from out of town. They’ll get her out of here. Nobody listens to me.” Softlooking and skittish, the young man was balding early and his hair was cropped as closely as an army recruit’s. Up close, Muriel could see that his eyes and nose were raw. She asked if he too was related to Gus.

  “The son,” he said, with gloomy emphasis. “The Greek son.” He found some bitter humor in what he had said. He introduced himself as John Leonidis and offered a clammy hand. When Muriel had responded with her name and job title, John suddenly brightened.

  “Thank God,” he said. “That’s what my ma is waiting for, to talk to the prosecutor.” He slapped at his pockets until he realized he was already holding a pack of Kools. “Can I ask you something?” He took a seat on the stool beside her. “Am I a suspect?”

  “A suspect?”

  “I don’t know, there’s all kinds of stuff in my head. The only person I can think of who’d want to kill Gus is me.”

  “Did you?” Muriel asked, conversationally.

  John Leonidis fixed on the glowing end of his cigarette. His nails had been nibbled to ragged slivers.

  “I’d never have had the balls,” he said. “But you know, all this ‘good’ stuff. It was P.R. At home, he was a pig. Like he made my mother cut his toenails? Can you imagine? In the summer, he’d sit like a sultan on the back porch in the sun while she did it. I mean, it could make you vomit.”

  John gave his head a bitter toss, and then, with little warning, he began to cry. Muriel had been out of sorts with her own father before he died two years ago, and she had an instant appreciation of the tornado of confusion buffeting John. Tom Wynn had been President of the UAW local at the Ford plant outside Fort Hill, and a field rep, a man who spoke brotherhood in the plant and bile at home. Following his death, after too brief an interval, Muriel’s mother had married the principal of the school where she taught, but she was happier in love now than Muriel had ever been. Like John, Muriel had been left to labor with the stillborn emotions that accompanied everything unfinished with her father. As John struggled for his composure, pinching the bridge of his nose, Muriel laid her hand over his on the marked Formica of the counter.

  By the time John’s mother emerged from the r
est room, he had gathered himself. As he had predicted, when he introduced Muriel as “the prosecutor,” Athena Leonidis, who only a moment before had been wilted by grief, stiffened to deliver her message.

  “They should be dead, I want them dead,” she said, “the filth who did this my Gus. Dead. With my own eyes. I will not sleep till I see.” She dissolved again and fell upon her son, who, over his mother’s shoulder, cast Muriel another bleak look.

  But she understood Mrs. Leonidis. Muriel, too, believed in punishment. Her mother, the teacher, was the touchy-feely type, turn the other cheek, but Muriel had always agreed with her father, who defended some of the bare-knuckles maneuvers of life in the union by saying that humans were not going to be good on their own, they needed some encouragement. In an ideal world, you’d give everybody who lived right a medal. Yet there was neither tin nor time enough to do that in this life. Thus, another kind of object lesson was required—so that the good got something for their efforts. Pain had to be wrought upon the body of the bad. Not because there was any special delight in their suffering. But because there was pain in goodness—the pangs of denial, the blistering under the hand of restraint. The good deserved an even trade. Murder required death. It was part of the fundamental reciprocity that was the law.

  The Detective Commander, Harold Greer, appeared. He encouraged Mrs. Leonidis to go home, but it was Muriel he wanted. Greer introduced himself back in Gus’s small office.

  “I’ve been waiting for somebody from the P.A.’s Office for two hours. Tommy Molto’s nowhere to be found.” Molto, the head of Homicide, had recently regained his job in a civil suit, after being fired for supposedly framing a defendant. No one yet knew quite what to make of Tommy. “Larry says you’re smart.”

  Muriel hitched a shoulder. “Consider the source.”

  Sober by nature, Greer nonetheless managed a spirited laugh. Larry probably never had a boss he didn’t turn into a rival.

  “Well, if you’re smart enough to get a search warrant on a holiday weekend, you’re smart enough for me,” said Greer.

  She ended up making notes on the back of one of the green tablets of order tickets the waitstaff used. Harold needed warrants for the cars in the parking lot, and, as a double-check, the houses of Gus’s staff. Before they parted, Muriel felt obliged to repeat John Leonidis’s remarks about wanting to kill his father.

  “Hell,” said Harold and frowned. Nobody liked having to beat up on the bereaved.

  “It’s just the shock,” said Muriel. “You know how it is. Families?”

  “Right,” said Greer. He had a family, too. “Get me those warrants, huh? And give me your phone numbers in case I need something else.”

  She had no clue where she’d find a judge to sign a warrant at 4 p.m. Friday on a holiday weekend. When Harold left, she remained in the tiny office, feeling saddened by the proximity of Gus’s personal things, while she phoned felony judges at home. Gillian Sullivan, Muriel’s last choice, sounded, as usual, well sauced and sleepy, but she was available. Muriel headed for the office in the County Building, where she’d have to type up the warrants herself.

  She was excited. In the P.A.’s Office, there was a standing rule: once you touched a case it was yours. The maxim kept deputies from dumping their dogs, and political heavyweights from clouting their way onto plum assignments. Even so, she’d probably be stuck as third chair, because it would be a capital prosecution. Only if John and Athena were the kind to say no more killing would the P.A. hesitate to seek execution, and the Leonidis family clearly was not in that frame of mind. So it would be a trial—no one pled to capital murder—a big one. Muriel would see her name on the front page of the Tribune before this was over. The prospect sparked the nerves all over her body.

  As a child, she’d had a prolonged fear of dying. She would lie in bed trembling, realizing that the whole long journey to grow up would only bring her closer to that point of terrifying blackness at the end. In time, though, she accepted her mother’s counsel. There was only one way out—to make your mark, to leave some trace behind that would not be vaporized by eternity. A hundred years from now, she wanted somebody to look up and say, ‘Muriel Wynn, she did good things, we’re all better off now.’ She never thought that would be easy. Hard work and risk were part of the picture. But obtaining justice for Gus, for all these people, was important, part of the never-ending task of setting her shoulder to the bulwark and holding back the grisly impulses that would otherwise engulf the world.

  Leaving, she found Larry on the pavement in front of the restaurant, holding off Stanley Rosenberg, the rodent-faced investigative reporter from Channel 5. Stanley kept wheedling, no matter how many times Larry told him to talk to Greer, and finally Starczek, who generally had little use for journalists, simply turned away.

  “Fucking vulture,” he said to Muriel, who walked beside him. Their cars were in the same direction. She could feel the grimness they’d left back there lingering with her on the gray streets, like an odor that stayed in your clothing.

  “So Harold hired you?”

  “You do good work,” she said. They’d reached her Honda. She thanked Larry circumspectly and said “See ya,” but he reached for her arm.

  He said, “So who is it?”

  When she finally caught the drift, she told him to forget it.

  “Hey, you think I’m not gonna hear?”

  They went a few more rounds before she gave in.

  “Talmadge,” she finally said.

  “Talmadge Lor-man?”

  “Really, Larry. In your whole entire life, how many other people named Talmadge have you met?”

  Talmadge, a former Congressman and now a renowned business lawyer and lobbyist, had been their Contracts professor when Larry and Muriel were in law school. Three years ago, Talmadge’s wife had died at forty-one of breast cancer. Having shared a spouse’s untimely death had drawn Muriel and him together. The relationship sparked, but it was off-and-on, which was how it always seemed to go with Muriel and men. Lately, though, they’d been gathering momentum. With both daughters in college now, Talmadge was tired of being alone. And she enjoyed the force field around him—epical events always seemed to be at hand when you were with Talmadge.

  “You’re really going to marry Talmadge Lorman?”

  “We’re not getting married. I told you I had a feeling this might, maybe, could, perhaps, probably-not lead to something. It’s a million miles from that right now. I just wanted to give you the heads-up about why I won’t come running when you whistle.”

  “Whistle?”

  Perhaps it was the conversation, which seemed weird on both ends, but she felt a fugue state grip her, as if she were hovering over the scene, outside the person of Muriel. Often in the last few years she’d had moments like this, where the real and true Muriel seemed to be there but undetectable, a tiny kernel of something that existed but had no visible form. She’d been the usual pain-in-the-rear teenager, who thought the entire world was a fraud, and in some ways she’d never gotten over that. She knew that everybody was in it for themselves. That’s what had drawn her to the law—she relished the aspect of the advocate’s role that required her to rip though everyone’s poses. Yet the same convictions made it hard to cross the breach with anybody else.

  That was what seemed to bring Larry back time and again on the merry-go-ronnd—she knew him. He was smart—smarter than nice—and she enjoyed his jaundiced humor, and his equally sure sense of her. He was a big man, Polish and German in terms of his background, with innocent blue eyes, a big, round face, and blondish hair he was starting to lose. Masculine, you’d say, rather than handsome, but full of primal appeal. Playing around with him was the kind of screwball whim that marked her earlier years, when she thought it was a riot to be the wild child. But he was married—and a cop to the core. Now she told herself again what she’d told him—she had to move on.

  She looked down the street to be certain they were unobserved, and took hold of one button on
his shirt, a loose acetate number he wore under a poplin sport coat. She gave it a final familiar tug, a request, at close quarters, for mercy. Then she started her car. The engine turned over, and her heart picked up when she remembered the case.

  5

  OCTOBER 3, 1991

  Running Leads

  ON HIS WAY to DuSable Field to ask more questions about Luisa Remardi, Larry stopped off in the Point to see a house. About ten years ago, right after he’d worked the murder of a real estate broker, Larry got into rehabbing, turning over a property every eighteen months or so for a pretty good dollar. When he was younger, he’d regarded law enforcement as a way station. He loved the work, but until he dropped out of law school and accepted the Force as Kismet, he’d envisioned some higher destiny for himself among the power elite. These days, whatever visions of stature he retained rested on real estate.

  On a mild fall afternoon, Larry pondered the house, which a broker had tipped him would be listed later this week. The Point, long a sanctuary for Kindle County’s small African-American middle class, had begun attracting singles and young families of all races looking for better deals on houses close to Center City. This place, a big Victorian, was a Yuppie magnet if ever there was one. It had been split into apartments, but many of the original features remained intact, including the square widow’s walks surrounding the belfries on each end, and the original spear-topped cast-iron fence in which yellow leaves were now trapped in soft heaps.